Startup HiringSolved Raises $1M for expansion

HiringSolved the only global social recruiting tool that delivers candidates across all skill sets and industries announced the completion of a $1 million raise from a group of Arizona-based business leaders and angel investors.

The raise will be used to continue development of HiringSolved’s proprietary SaaS-based platform, make additional engineering-side hires and expand the company’s reach via additional sales and marketing efforts. The round represents HiringSolved’s first external funding round, and was completed in just 30 days.

HiringSolved was developed out of co-founder Shon Burton’s frustration with current inefficient methodologies used for recruiting. As a former professional recruiter in San Francisco for top tech companies, he explained that the current status quo for finding the right employee involves recruiters manually combing through the Internet and using outdated technology to find the right person for the job. Sure there is Monster and Career Builder, but for Burton, the best candidates are the ones referred by friends and rarely post a resume.

Burton said he and co-founder Trevor Olson are prepared to disrupt the $10 billion recruiting industry with HiringSolved, and they are certainly on their way as their team has been hired by top Fortune 1000 companies (Intel, Richo and SalesForce) to help them recruit.

HiringSolved works by aggregating information about an individual through their social footprint and developing a profile about the potential candidate. Information is gathered through a web crawler then paired with their “tech and value secret sauce” as Burton puts it. The secrets include algorithms used to aggregate data and user interaction, filters to formulate the profile, prediction analytics and a lightning fast turn around.

“We have the fastest search in the business and have access to every tool. The results come back at a rate of .05 seconds. We’ve heard our customers gasp at the speed of information presented to them,” Burton said.

How are they going to compete with the big online recruiting companies? Burton said that those companies will continue to be dominant, but that they are filled with active candidates and “…the notion of recruiting is that a lot of the desk hires are passive hires, they get recruited by their friends…these are the ones that never write their resume.” Burton said.

Turning to privacy, what if a candidate doesn’t want all of their comments, posts, and bar photos shown to a potential employer?

“A lot of information we obtain is not related to employment. We seek to build a profile that is similar to a resume; we seek to provide recruiting relevant information and filter out everything that isn’t relevant to our users. We may find all of your rants, but we don’t find that relevant to surface stories, because I don’t think recruiters care – we want to know your expertise.”

With the recent raise, Burton explained that they intend to scale, build out more features to the product, such as facial recognition, hire more engineers and add more sales people to the mix.

“We are two guys competing against Monster, and kicking their ass,” Burton said.